The Best Toffee Ever!

The one thing all my friends and family look most forward to during the holidays are the boxes of baked goodies that I give out as gifts and the one thing they love the most in that box that I MUST put in every year is my toffee. I guess I never thought of actually taking money for it, but recently a friend of a friend asked if I'd be interested in selling her 1lb boxes of it to give out to friends and this lead me to make more toffee then I ever make outside of December. It's a lot of fun and it's starting to look more and more professional.

A Rainbow beneath the Monochrome

A friend of mine was throwing a birthday party and asked me to make the birthday cake. But not just any one, the same one as I made for his wedding (white champagne cake with a raspberry mousse, chocolate ganache and buttercream frosting)...but not green...and not pink....or blue.... After we went over the colors "not allowed" I decided that I'm going to mess with him a bit, so I made the cake black and white (see pic above), but I couldn't leave things there, especially since he made such a distinct point about all the colors I couldn't include, so I decided that he was not very specific and only told me not to use those colors on the outside...so I put them inside :) With some of the leftover batter I made 6 cupcakes one of which you see here (you can get a bit of an idea of the trickery in this picture):



The color breakdown was a lot neater in the cake layers, but I forgot to take pictures at the party, so the split cupcake will have to do. Everyone was very surprised when the cake was cut and had a lot of fun teasing him about the colors inside. His wife even said that the colors made the cake taste better :)

Nothing warms a house like a Cosmo...

...Cupcake that is. Okay, that was really cheesy, but it's pretty late Sunday night and I've had a pretty full weekend. On Saturday I went to my friend's housewarming, and I thought it'd be a good chance to try out a new recipe for cosmo-inspired cupcakes. The cake itself is cranberry-lime, soaked in vodka-cranberry syrup and topped with cranberry lime buttercream. The recipe I found for the frosting really needs fixing. I made it almost according to the instructions, but I cut the sugar in half and when I tasted it, it was still too sweet so I added a package of cream cheese to cut that. It came out much better, but still a bit too sweet for my taste. I'll try to incorporate these flavors into a meringue buttercream for next time. I shared a few of the "extras" with my friends, and my family, and my sister brought two of them back to school with her to share with her friends there. All in all the cupcakes were a hit at the party and everyone I heard back from, though my parent's agreed with me on the frosting, which just goes to show just how spoiled they are :)